From the Archive: Dr. Rashid Sumaila on Fish, Value and the Future of Our Oceans
This interview was originally broadcast in December 2021 on The Blue Hour on CiTR 101.9 FM at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Dr. Rashid Sumaila is a University Killam Professor and Canada Research Chair in Interdisciplinary Ocean and Fisheries Economics at UBC. His research examines the economics of fisheries and the oceans, including overfishing, fisheries subsidies, marine conservation and how we might manage ocean resources more sustainably.
After spending a few days by the Mediterranean Sea recently, eating wonderful seafood, I found myself returning to this conversation.
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The Blue Hour, hosted by Farha Guerrero, airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. on CiTR 101.9 FM at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and at citr.ca.
Transcript
Rashid: My name is Rashid Sumaila, and I'm a professor and Canada Research Chair in Interdisciplinary Ocean and Fisheries Economics. If you think of the relationship between people and the ocean, all the good stuff we take from the ocean, the fish, the oil, we do what we do with that, and we produce waste, which we pump into the ocean. Because the ocean is so vast and large, it doesn't mean we cannot mess it up.
Being large doesn't mean that we cannot protect it. We have communities and cultures that can be brought together to really help us manage this. How do you take these resources and use them to benefit as many people as possible? This is not only a source of food and recreation, it is simply a source of life.
The oceans are our life.
Farha: Welcome to The Blue Hour. I'm Farha Guerrero.
Tonight I speak with Rashid Sumaila, who learned early in life about the importance of being environmentally conscious. His grandfather used to tell him that people should walk as if the earth feels pain.
Rashid Sumaila is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Interdisciplinary Ocean and Fisheries Economics at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia.
He wakes up each day thinking about how to ensure that we bequeath a healthy ocean to our children and grandchildren. His latest book, Infinity Fish, is a wonderful testament to this grand idea.
But first, let's start the night with his music choice. This one comes from his son, Haske, who composed this song titled "Seafoam."
Rashid Sumaila, thank you so much for joining me today. We just listened to your son's song, a beautiful piece called "Seafoam." I think it will resonate a lot with what we're going to talk about today because we are going to be talking about the oceans.
Rashid: What I can say about starting with my son is he's an amazing young man. He just finished UBC. He did integrated engineering and is working with an aerospace company here in Vancouver.
Since the beginning, he's been talented. He loved music. He had his guitar. He would just sit down and compose things on his own. He's a person who writes well. He likes maths. So he's that kind of lucky person, if you like.
He keeps making this music. When this opportunity came, I said, "Do you have anything you can share that we can use? Send me something and I'll send it to Farha and see what she thinks."
And you loved this particular one, "Seafoam," which actually rhymes with our issues, because the ocean and the sea are what I spend my academic work, my academic life, looking at. So it's just fit for purpose here. It wonderfully fits.
Farha: I want to congratulate you on receiving a wonderful award. You've received many, but this one is the Killam Professorship at UBC, which is an extraordinary award, and you received it earlier this year.
Congratulations on that. How does it feel to be recognized as a Killam professor?
Rashid: Thank you very much, first of all, for doing this and getting some of my ideas and thoughts out to a larger audience. The Killam University Professorship is quite special.
You win awards. You win some that are national, that are international. But this is actually a UBC award, which is recognized by your peers. This is the highest award UBC can give anyone. So this is especially special to me. I'm so grateful for it.
I thank the jury and everybody involved. This is remarkable.
Farha: It is. I think it really recognizes all of the decades of work that you have been doing at the university.
Speaking of which, we spoke at UBC just under a decade ago, way back in 2012. You came to the CiTR studio.
Coincidentally, it was the same year that you had attended a conference in Namibia about how to help sustain Africa's marine fisheries. That conference inspired a recent book of yours, a book that you just published called Infinity Fish, which I hope we can talk about today.
Maybe you can fast forward the time since we've spoken. What have you been doing? What have you been busy with during the last decade?
Rashid: Thank you for that interview. I really value and appreciate the relationship between me as an academic scientist and journalists and people who do science journalism like you, because there's no point just publishing your papers and leaving them in the journals for colleagues.
You've got to get the information out. I think that interview you did with me was part of this. So you are part of the reason I actually got selected and won the University Killam Prize. Thank you for your input in this.
In 2012, I got invited to Namibia to give a talk. It was a national fisheries conference. Two other African ministers were invited, from the Seychelles and from Sierra Leone.
I didn't quite understand the politics that was going on, but I always knew that in Namibia, diamonds and fish are really important to the economy. I think each of them separately contributes at least about 10% to the national GDP, the gross domestic product. So it's really important.
I go in there, and as part of my talk, I told them, "Look, I'm here to convince you that fish is more valuable than diamonds."
It was amazing to see the reaction from the room. Half of the room, including the minister of fisheries, were all so happy. You could see it on their faces. And the diamond people were in there. They didn't like it, obviously. I was turning what they believed was more valuable on its head.
How did I explain this? Simply, I had two reasons.
I said, "Look here, if you look at fish, if you manage it well, effectively, it can continue to give you benefit through time because it's renewable. You can keep coming each year for some fish to feed your family, to do your basic economic stuff. And mathematically, anything that can give you a benefit to infinity, when you sum the benefit, is going to be infinity."
So infinity fish. That is where the title of my book came from.
On the other hand, when you think of diamonds, when you dig a ton of diamonds, you cannot come back next year and dig that same ton. It's gone forever. So diamonds are actually not forever, as people tell us in the popular parlance.
You dig it, it's gone. You can tell me you can save the benefits and earn money in the stock market, but I know that governments are always running deficits. So that doesn't hold water either.
My second point is that fish is really everybody's valuable thing in the sense that when you have a room full of people like I had in Namibia, you ask them, "How many of you have eaten fish in the last week?" You're going to get a huge proportion. In Namibia, that will be virtually everybody raising their hand.
Now ask people, "How many of you have seen diamonds in your life?" There will be virtually nobody in the room.
Diamonds are an elitist commodity. A few people mine it, they make the money, they run off with it. But fish, every coastal person can just go get it, feed your family. So it is more the people's valuable thing, and therefore it's more valuable than diamonds.
The room went ballistic. It was amazing to see the reaction.
Since then, I've been building this story and looking at valuation, how we value our oceans, how we value natural resources, our environment, how comprehensive it is.
If you look at it in the book, you see that we care mostly just about what we can sell. But the values are bigger than that. You just have to ask our Indigenous population in BC, the First Nations Fisheries Council, whom I collaborate with.
The value of a salmon to the First Nations is far larger than just the price you get in the market.
When you do all this properly, you get to infinity fish, where you can pass on a healthy ocean with solid, sustainable, healthy fish stocks to your children and grandchildren. Then you give them the opportunity to do the same to their own.
This can go on to infinity. Then we have infinity fish. That is the idea behind the book.
It all started in what I call, and many people do, the mother of all continents, Africa. I gave a talk about this in the U.S. The room was full. I talked about the new book and I said, "You are all Africans."
The room just went ballistic. So that's where everything started, with people, human beings.
Farha: It's absolutely wonderful, Rashid. I love how you said that over the last decade since we spoke, you've been weaving together more of this story. Now that I'm talking to you, I'm seeing more of the story coming together in many beautiful ways.
Isn't that wonderful to say as an economist? Because in the end, even if you're an economist or a scientist or a First Nations person, as you've said, all of you have something important in this story and something to contribute.
That leads me to my next question. In the more recent past, you're starting to consider yourself more as an interdisciplinary oceans and fisheries economist. These big global issues, which we'll hear about today, cannot be solved by one discipline.
There needs to be much more interaction and really a solidarity that's beyond just what might be happening at conferences or on government tables.
Talk about that, and also about your wish to launch a kind of future sub-discipline where you will collaborate more academically and, as you said, even with First Nations groups that might tie into values that might not reach into academia, for example, spiritual and cultural values.
How do you plan to launch something like that? And how do you see yourself in the future as this interdisciplinary economist?
Rashid: I describe myself as an interdisciplinary oceans and fisheries economist. To really see how I evolved and why I evolved to this, I would like to take my listeners through this.
Think of our relationship with the environment in general and with the ocean in particular. If you go down to the basics, what do we people do with or to the environment, to the ocean?
I think we basically do two things. We go to the ocean, we take the stuff we need, the stuff we desire, the stuff we want, for example, the fish.
We take them into our economy and we do all the stuff people do with fish. It's cultural, it's food, it's nutrition, it's social, it's economics. That is what we do.
When we do all these things, what do we produce at the end? We produce waste. You pump out CO2 while you are riding around trying to catch your fish with your trawler, bottom trawler. Or you end up leaving some of your fishing gear and it becomes plastic in the ocean and kills the animals.
From the ocean, good things come, such as the fish we need and want, and bad things go.
For us to really do this wisely and not end up with a dead ocean, we need to understand the ecology of the ocean, the biophysics of the ocean, all the natural sciences.
When we get into the economy, even before how we catch the fish, the people side, which is all our spiritual values, our cultural values, our economics, our social systems, Indigenous people, non-Indigenous people, all the societal stuff.
And then the pumping out, we need to understand how to do this. We need to reduce CO2. People are developing green chemistry to avoid all the toxins coming out.
As you see me paint this picture, you can see straight away that no single discipline can actually handle all this. We've got to work together. Not even economists. I like to say this when I'm in a room full of economists.
We need everybody. We need all perspectives. In fact, we don't need just scientists, we need non-scientists.
I had the privilege of getting a SSHRC partnership grant about six years ago, a partnership grant I called the OceanCanada Partnership. That was really the place where I played around with my colleagues in a large group, where we demonstrated how to do this, essentially, using Canada's three coasts as a laboratory.
This has come so far and done so well that on the 30th of November, SSHRC announced their five Impact Award winners. I was one of them for the partnership grant because of the way we brought people together.
We have 22 partners, over 100 people, lots of students. I love students and postdocs because that's the future.
We worked for six years. We have the DFO, the government. We had the Vancouver Port Authority here as part of it. We have First Nations, we have fish NGOs.
We worked together to look right from the ecology through to the economics and the cultural side, to try to understand the future of Canada's oceans.
For example, the Arctic is most likely going to see more fish, different types of fish coming. So commercial fishers may begin to be interested because they see the potential.
But what happens to our First Nations communities who have been living there for centuries, living their Arctic, low-energy life, meeting their needs, doing ice fishing, and suddenly you have trawlers coming in? What does it mean?
I alone can't understand this. No way. I need a team.
That is where we are, and I'm taking this forward into the future. I also believe many of our students on this project, some of them are professors already, are going to propagate this.
Hopefully my next book, I'm going to write about interdisciplinary ocean and fisheries economics. Hopefully even to launch a sub-discipline in that sense.
Farha: What's amazing listening to you, Rashid, is at one glance one might think maybe you're not an economist. You might sound like a scientist, or you might be one of these other people that you've mentioned in this big story.
I think that's wonderful because I don't feel that you wear any one particular hat. And yet you are an economist.
The difference also with you is that you, like many economists around the world, are looking at something that actually includes the entire ocean, which is quite phenomenal.
You've said the ocean is not just our livelihood and how we can depend on it. It's life. Fifty percent of our oxygen, you've said this many times, comes from the ocean. Sixty percent of people around the world live near some sort of coastline and depend on the ocean.
You've even said that those people who recreate on the ocean, the surfers, recreational fishermen, snorkelers, divers, they're important too.
Rashid: We see the ocean as one ocean, technically, because they are connected. We break them into the Atlantic, the Pacific, to make it easier for us to deal with them. But essentially, they are all connected.
I think the ocean for me is a symbol of our world.
For the world to be healthy environmentally, socially, economically, we really have to think at this level. We have to understand that none of us, no part of the world, can truly be safe and peaceful and well-to-do without the rest of the world being the same.
Ultimately, if I were to set an agenda for the world, citizens of the world, all of us, should aim to work to really ensure that life is livable for all human beings.
Not only for all human beings, but life is also sustainable for nature. The two have to work together for this to work. You cannot just say, "Only me, me, me. Only people, only people."
It's not going to help you.
We see it with COVID-19. Some of us feel the way to deal with this is to close our own borders and protect ourselves. It's not going to work.
We have to get control of this virus all over the world, and then we are all safe. That is the way I see the world.
The ocean gives me that ability to do this because it's everywhere. It's 70% of the world. Whether you like it or not, you're connected to the ocean. It gives us oxygen. It modifies the temperature, and so on.
When the climate, when the weather is messed up, it's not nature that feels the pain. It's we, the people, who feel the pain.
In Vancouver, in BC, we've seen it this year, from the heat, from the wildfires, and now floods. You see a city being burned down. You see towns becoming rivers suddenly. It just breaks your heart.
People say, think globally and act locally. I really think we have to think and act both locally and globally, both locally and regionally, both locally and nationally.
That is where we have to be. I know it's not easy, but I really think that is when we will start to have an equitable, sustainable world for all.
All the management strategies that we have today were really developed thousands of years ago by the Pacific Islanders. Things like closed areas, closed seasons for spawning, minimum size limits.
Somebody would say, "He's a fisherman. Is he a good fisherman?" The definition of a good fisherman is not somebody who goes out there and harvests everything.
A successful fisherman is somebody who goes out there and takes care of the ocean while harvesting from the ocean.
Audio clip: In the years since the rise of global commercial fishing, 90% of fish stocks have been fished at or above their maximum sustainable yield, proving a desperate need for global, sustainable fishery management.
For years, we've been puzzling over the problem of showing people what's happening way offshore, out of sight, or underneath the surface of the water. We stumbled across a system of radio frequency broadcasts that can be intercepted by satellites to take all of the commercial fishing activity in the ocean and put it on a map for everybody to see.
Strengthened by satellite-assisted monitoring, international partnerships have grown, sharing data on shared fish stocks. Before, we were acting individually. We were not seeing, we were not knowing.
Now the only way you can fish in our EEZ is to be compliant, be legal, and then we can cooperate in sustainable fishing.
Following in the footsteps of successful regional partnerships, shared management of shared fish stocks went global with the ratification of the Port State Measures Agreement by 36 parties covering 62 countries and the partnerships of the Safe Ocean Network.
Agreeing shared frameworks for global fishery management, rewarding the good fishermen, and taking bold collective steps forward toward the rhythms of our sustainable past.
We in the West are just starting to realize the frailty and the finiteness of the ocean. When you decide that this is your priority, it must be reflected throughout the system.
It's our life. The ocean is our life.
Farha: The other thing about your book, Infinity Fish, is this idea about future generations. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? A healthy ocean means future generations having that healthy ocean.
Rashid: Before I get to that, I wanted to pick up on fish knowing no boundaries. They go where they go.
I make jokes when I give talks, and our jokes are not just jokes. They mean something.
I was talking in London and there was a big debate on Brexit. I said, "The fish, they don't care whether you Brexit or no Brexit. French fish go where they go. British fish go where they go."
The same thing goes when I'm in the U.S.
Mexican fish, no wall can stop them. They go.
This is really important.
The first time I said this was when I was part of the movie The End of the Line. I'm sure many listeners will know this. It's been described as the inconvenient truth of the ocean. If you haven't seen this, I think it's worth looking at.
It's the first real science-based movie about the ocean. I had a few minutes in there and I was interviewed. I was taken to the port in Senegal and we were following a trawler, seeing all the discards and so on.
I was interviewed and I said, "Fish from Namibia, from Senegal, within 10 hours, many of them get to the markets in Europe straight away. They get visas to go straight away, but Africans cannot get visas to go to Europe."
This is the thing about fish, wild fish, whether freshwater or ocean fisheries, naturally given to us, is very valuable.
My point of departure is that the current generation has no right to deprive future generations of this same bounty. When we manage the fisheries, we are managing it on our behalf and on behalf of those to come after us.
If you ask my future granddaughter how to handle fish, I think she could tell you, "Leave the fish in there until I come into the scene, until I'm here to also enjoy."
If you ask somebody now, they will want to take the fish now. So you have to find a balance.
That led me and my colleagues to develop what we call an intergenerational discounting approach. That is a way to value future fish in ways that do not diminish the fish of our grandchildren. We give them equal weight at the minimum.
This idea connects very nicely to Indigenous thinking. I think in BC, here in Canada, Indigenous people have this idea of seventh-generation thinking, where what guides them is that they are not managing this only for their generation, but for the seventh generation.
Think about infinity fish thinking. That is central.
We need to do this for our environment. This connects to climate change. If we don't want to adjust, we don't want to take any action because we think it's costly, and we hand over to our grandchildren a terrible environment where they have to live with extreme weather, the kind we've seen here in BC, if it repeats more often, can you imagine how life will be here?
Future generations are crucial in our thinking if we're going to have a sustainable world.
That thinking is also good for us, because all the things we need to do to ensure future generations have the fish and the environment they need are the things we need to do to ensure that we continue to have it too.
So this is not only being nice to future generations, it's actually being nice to ourselves too.
Farha: You and your team offer many wonderful solutions, not just to overfishing, but also to calculating these kinds of parameters, the value that we put on fish stocks.
You're capturing the smaller fishing communities and the smaller communities as much as the bigger ones as well.
But over the years you've also presented some quite big ideas, and I think we should talk about that. The idea of the high seas being a kind of savings bank.
Rashid: The high seas.
What we have done, many people through the UN system in this case, is split the ocean into two parts.
The first one is what we call exclusive economic zones of coastal countries. For Canada, when you're on the Pacific coast, when you go 200 nautical miles into the ocean, that is considered the exclusive economic zone of Canada. Canada has the right, mandated through the UN system, to manage and control it.
No country can just come into that area and fish. These are country waters, essentially. Countries, to different degrees, are successful or not in managing that.
But at least we know it's under the control of countries.
The high seas are the areas beyond these 200 nautical miles. It's a large part of the ocean. It's actually two-thirds of the ocean.
Most of the productive parts of the ocean are within the 200 nautical miles, around the continental shelves of countries. Those are the most productive.
The high seas are not very productive. They contain fish that are very special. Some of them live very long. Some of them live longer than people, over 100 years and so on. Alfonsino and orange roughy and the like. They are slow-growing.
They are almost like the diamonds I talked about. When you fish them, you are essentially mining them. That is not good for biodiversity.
There are a lot of fish that go in and out of the high seas and country waters, like the tunas, the highly migratory stocks. This is why high seas fishing is popular for some countries.
But again, it's two-thirds of the ocean, and we take about 5%, 8%, 10% maximum of the total catch out of the high seas.
So here comes economics.
I was sitting and thinking about this. This is two-thirds of the ocean. We catch 5% of the total catch. It's a large area.
Even without doing any deep analysis, you just think about it. Boats riding around all this big area just to catch 5% of fish that actually do spend time in country waters. They pump CO2. They disturb these long-living species for not much money or jobs.
This doesn't make sense.
This was where the idea to close the high seas to fishing and turn it into a fish bank came to me. I started talking with my colleagues, and this has led to several papers.
Give the fish that go in and out, when they go in there, they get the peace. They get the break. They grow well. They enjoy their freedom. They are like people, actually. They lay more eggs.
The eggs fly into the country easily. Juvenile fish move over, even adults. We catch them cheaply without pumping out CO2 too much.
Just think of all the benefits.
What is more, at the moment, only around eight countries take 80% of the catch in the high seas, the big, rich countries. We're talking about China. We're talking about Korea, Taiwan, Spain.
But if we turn this into a fish bank, small countries, developing countries where people really need the fish to eat, will be able to catch them too. Historically, this has been the case.
It's such a beautiful idea. You give the fish a break. We get better biodiversity. We get better economies. We also get better distribution of benefits.
Slowly, it's catching up. Since we started talking about this, people thought I was crazy in the beginning. I kept pushing.
Now we have our first large high seas closed area in the Ross Sea in Antarctica. I think more are to come because more and more people are seeing the social, economic, biodiversity and climate benefits.
The day we do this, I can actually retire. I'll be so happy.
Farha: We know around the world with marine protected areas, even when governments, countries and populations protect very small pieces of the ocean in coastal areas, you see dramatic changes. You see the fish, the coral, the health of the oceans come back in these little pockets.
Rashid: Absolutely. Our calculations show that we will be catching more fish overall if we did that than what we are catching now.
The spillover is going to give more fish on your table than now.
Farha: You mentioned the documentary The End of the Line. I myself, when I was a high school student, went on a government exchange. This was in 1994, to Corner Brook, Newfoundland.
I witnessed firsthand as a young person the devastating effects of that collapse of the cod fishery.
Let's listen now to a clip from the documentary The End of the Line, produced in 2009. This one covers the collapse of the cod fisheries in Newfoundland in the 1990s.
Audio clip from The End of the Line: We never used to think about where our fish came from. But in fact, they're wild animals. And we found that out to our cost for the first time in Newfoundland.
For centuries, the waters in northern Canada teemed with unbelievable amounts of cod fish. Legend had it that you could walk across their backs on the water.
The cod was so plentiful the communities thrived on fishing. As the years went on, technology improved. The boats got bigger and catches increased. The bounties seemed endless.
Then, in 1992, the unthinkable happened.
In St. John's tonight, angry fishermen vented their rage. They charged the room where John Crosbie was holding a news conference, but security would not let them in.
What had once been the most abundant cod population in the world had been fished out of existence.
"I've decided that effective at midnight tonight there will be a moratorium on harvesting of northern cod until the spring of 1994."
"Either we cooperate in addressing it or there's going to be no fish for anybody. No fish for the Europeans, no fish for the Canadians, and an ecological catastrophe on our hands."
Overnight, 40,000 people lost their jobs.
The cod is gone, and within the context of cod, particularly in the Canadian perspective, this is a species that has been fished for centuries and centuries. Cod was the reason that people migrated from the UK, from Europe, northern France in particular, to Canada. It was because of cod.
The fishing ban brought the people to the streets. They hoped that one day the cod would return. The significance didn't dawn on anybody until much later.
Today, there are so few left that they've got endangered status in Canada, and the cod populations have not rebounded despite a moratorium on cod fishing since 1992.
In 2007, this research vessel set two lines, each with 1,500 hooks, to find out how many cod were left in the waters off eastern Canada. On the first line, they caught one small cod fish. On the second, a small basket fish.
The cod stocks had been depleted to such a low level that they were unable to recover.
For Newfoundland, for a community for which the whole reason for its existence was cod, there's this historical ingrained element. It's part of society, permeates society, and the loss of the fish was basically akin to a loss of soul, and it still remains that 15 years later.
Farha: My sense is, Rashid, you are positive. You've got an optimistic outlook.
How do you keep that optimism? I think even the title of your book, Infinity Fish, is quite optimistic. We can find solutions.
Rashid: Absolutely. I am optimistic. I remain optimistic.
Actually, I believe I have no option but to be optimistic, because what does it mean not to be optimistic? To give up? To stop trying? No way.
To be optimistic is the way to go. If we look back in history, optimists have helped the world in so many ways.
Society has made some progress, whether you're talking about human rights, whether you're talking about civil rights or gender imbalance. So I like to remain hopeful.
I also say that if I, little Rashid, I like to call myself little Rashid, if I give up now, what would somebody like Nelson Mandela looking up from his grave say about me?
"What have you seen, Rashid? Remain optimistic. Keep doing it."
That is the only way we can improve our world, because that's all that we have.
Farha: One of your heroes is a man named Wassily Leontief. He was the Nobel Prize winner in 1973 in Economic Sciences.
He's also the creator of the input-output technique, a method that provides tools for a systematic analysis of the complicated inter-industry transactions in an economy.
I thought it'd be nice just to listen to him. This is a piece from the archives.
Wassily Leontief, archival audio: In 1973, the United Nations came to me and asked to help report how one could study less developed countries. I said, "I have to construct an input-output table of the entire world." They opened their eyes.
Since the United Nations received money for that from Holland, because the Dutch are always very good at subsidizing progressive research, they told me, "Go ahead to Holland and explain to the Dutch."
People in the foreign ministry were very surprised. But I suppose we decided, why not? And I made a study.
It was called The Future of the World Economy, which was translated into 13 languages. What I did with this type of approach was to project alternative paths to the future. I projected several alternative paths.
One of them was to see how much assistance less developed countries would need in order to be able at least not to fall back, but slowly catch up with the developed countries.
I made also a big study on arms spending and the whole production of arms, use of arms. You can introduce it in the input-output table.
It is quite clear when one can ask ourselves, imagine we reduce production of arms and some of the resources which we save can be used for helping less developed countries.
Farha: Why was Wassily Leontief important to you, Rashid?
Rashid: There are a number of reasons, and the clip says a lot already.
One of the things I like doing is reading about scientists who have really made big contributions. I used to go to the office and do what I call random reading. I just pick scientists and read their background. His background struck me when I read it.
Leontief is a Russian, born in Russia. He started doing his economic work, but he did large-scale things like what he just described.
He put the whole economy on a piece of paper and said, "What does this economy generate? What are the outputs that it generates? What are the inputs that it takes in in order to produce this?"
That's the input-output table. Just put them on a sheet and see what goes in here.
He started doing this when he was in Russia and, from my reading, he got into a lot of trouble in Russia because they said he's bringing economic thinking into a communist place.
In Russia, it wasn't even fellow scientists who were going after him. It was actually the government institutions. It's hard for an individual to fight the government.
At the end of the day, he migrated to the U.S. and continued doing his work.
But you know what happened in the U.S. too? They went after him saying he's bringing all this planning from the communist system to a market system.
But in the U.S., the good thing was it was his peers, his fellow scientists who didn't agree, and he could just ignore them and keep doing his work.
This is one of the reasons why I really love him. He kept on doing his thing.
The UN asked him to come and he used his theoretical framework to actually do something real.
What benefits would the world get if we just reduce some of the ridiculous amounts we are using on arms and turn it into making people's lives livable in the world?
It's such beautiful work. He takes the whole world.
That is another reason I like this piece of work, because it connects with my deep notion that, at the end of the day, citizens of the world have to make sure that the basic needs of everybody are met in a sustainable way.
We have to do this, otherwise we are in trouble.
You talked about the Newfoundland example. People were banging on the door. If we used a fraction of the resources that had to be used just to stop the rioting, the protests, that would have saved the fish and the people.
Think of this globally.
About 260 million people draw their income from fisheries. If we let this go, most of these people are in large developing countries, the kind of countries we are trying to help through the UN.
You are talking about China, Vietnam, Nigeria, huge countries.
I gave a talk in 2016 at the State Department. Obama talked before I came.
I gave my talk and I said if the fish go, all these millions of young people in developing countries, it's a big issue, not only for the countries but for the world. You have forced migration.
We have to do something to make them infinity fish and we will all have peace.
This is why I really admire his ability to see the world and do something scientifically that leads to practical solutions on the ground. That's beautiful science as far as I'm concerned.
Farha: We didn't get to fish subsidies. Fish subsidies can have detrimental effects on societies, especially on these smaller fishing communities.
Rashid: Subsidies are one of the things I have spent time on with my collaborators and students for two decades. We have been trying to build a database of subsidies. We update them year in, year out.
Many countries are negotiating right now. I should have been in Geneva, where the ministerial meeting was supposed to take place from November 30 to December 3.
We were expecting the world to have an agreement to take out what we call harmful overfishing subsidies. This goes to your future thinking.
Remember, subsidies are not all bad, like most things. It's what we do with our public funds.
I just led a group of nearly 300 scientists in an open letter that was published in Science, addressed to WTO members, where we argued for why these subsidies have to go or be redirected.
It's the bad subsidies that make people overfish and fish more than they would. Or you buy engines for people to go fish. It artificially increases their profit, and so they fish more.
In my book there's a chapter on subsidies. What I say is, if you keep giving subsidies, you can forget infinity fish because it helps to take down the resources that we need, the fish itself.
So you have the environmental problems with bad subsidies.
But what we have seen again and again is that it has social implications. They sabotage the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, 17 goals that are supposed to move the world towards infinity existence, not just fish.
They do this because about 80% of all the subsidies that are given by countries of the world, and that is $35 billion a year, go to large-scale fishing.
This is an industry you can generously estimate as a $100 billion revenue-generating industry, ocean fisheries. So 35% of the gross revenue of this industry is subsidies. Just think about that.
That leads to more fishing.
Only 20% of that goes to small-scale coastal fisheries. These are the people we need to really support because fish means their livelihood, their lives, their nutrition.
We give 80% to the large-scale industrial fishing boats that go all over the world, take the fish and move on.
This has implications for gender because most women who fish actually are small-scale. So we disadvantage them.
To me, that is the craziest thing the world can do because women all over the place are already so disadvantaged socially, economically, legally and otherwise. Religiously, for example. We shouldn't use our tax money to do this.
We also disadvantage the youth. Young people don't start with big industrial boats, so we keep them out by doing this.
Subsidies that lead to environmental degradation, social inequity and gender inequality are things I think the world should stay far away from.
Talking about the future, there are ideas like paying fishers who are used to being in the water, how about you pay them to fish for plastic? They clean the ocean of plastic, they give the fish a break, they make the ocean cleaner and therefore healthier, able to stop climate change.
We need to use our public funds cleverly rather than throwing them in as subsidies.
There's so much to talk about this.
The paper I mentioned in Science, together with my core team at UBC, we got 297 scientists from 255 institutions on all continents of the world except Antarctica to be part of this.
Talk about interdisciplinary global effort. That is a good example of that.
Farha: It's been wonderful to see what you've been up to over the last decade.
I hope we have another chance to speak again in the future. I wish you and your team the best of luck in all the things you're doing.
I hope the younger generation can hear podcasts like this because they are the future scientists, future economists, future policymakers who can make a difference.
Rashid: I really need to give credit to my parents. My grandfather was one of those who, without me knowing, put into us this idea that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it.
One of the things he used to tell us, we're jumping and playing and knocking all over with our soccer ball, this old man would say, "You should remember, behave, do as if the earth feels pain when you step on it. You don't just bang on the earth. Think as if it feels pain."
I think this was actually sophisticated environmentalism, which I realized later in life.
I credit my people when I was growing up back in West Africa.
Thank you.
Farha: Thank you. My guest today was Rashid Sumaila. You can learn more about his work through the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at UBC.
We're going to end today's show with another song composed by Rashid's son, Haske. This one is titled "Rose Garden."
Thank you for listening tonight.
Further Reading
Rashid Sumaila - Official Website
Infinity Fish: Economics and the Future of Fish and Fisheries